The murderous rampage that left 30 some people dead in Virginia is only an expression of what’s going on in the war, which is a murderous rampage carried out with the blessing of the state, capital and religion — His god-fearing armies rampage through the heathen oil fields slaughtering, and george bush says that the university will "get through this with the power of prayer."
Seung Cho was a disturbed young man, disturbed by a society that represses people and forces them into molds, molds he apparently just couldn’t fit. Ignored, unattended to, patronized, bullied, excluded, medicated, his violent passion built up, until at last it erupted with the volcanic eruption that needlessly ended his life and the lives of so many others. how truly pitiable it is that this person was driven to such lengths, to such insanity by his social and emotional problems, by this mass, anonymous, individuality-destroying society itself ! How sad and terrible the loss of so many lives in Cho’s breakdown into insanity because the administration failed to protect them, because they couldn’t protect themselves, because guns are so omnipresent and so easily procured, so often used as recourse !
How long will the safety valves that this corrupt and decrepit civilization sets up to vent our frustrated urges last ? Is it not, sadly, to be expected that they fail sometimes and people burst out in such a shameful, destructive, insane manner ? Seung Cho’s plays illustrate his bottled violence bubbling up — couldn’t someone have taken notice ? Cho was simply lashing out against a society that dismissed him and medicated him instead of admitting its own faults, its own violence, its own alienation, the ensemble of the repressive apparatus that Cho apparently mistook his fellow students and his professors for.
Wind-speed was so high on the day of the rampage that helicopters couldn’t be brought in to take out the dead and wounded of this bloody one man war against a repressed society ; imagine the scene as pollution further worsens weather conditions — while weather is good, murder decreases, and as the ice caps melt and we suffer the climate chaos resulting from our parents’ generation’s culture of waste and pollution, we are going to see more and more of these kinds of violent outbursts.
Like the masses of workers who have been mowed down by the bosses, or like the holocaust of Jews in Hitler’s death camps, most people, when intimidated by authority, seem either to hope quietly to survive, or to simply scatter and run instead of overwhelming their attackers with the sheer force of numbers. the whole event is a massive demonstration of the modern american college student’s alienation and defenselessness, and should be taken as a warning to the students of america to unite and build solidarity, so that they won’t panic and scatter but instead join together to confront the threat and subdue it collectively.
The administrations of the various universities routinely betray the students’ trust by failing to take care of them, as when they failed to shut down and evacuate the campus after the first shooting on that day. however, american students rarely take it upon themselves to unite and demand accountability from the administrations and so fail to ameliorate their disunited and passive state through the experience of a common struggle against the administration.
The disorganized, panicked students had lost their capacity to communicate and unite against their common threat so completely that the mass murderer had to end it himself with his own gun, instead of being taken down by people amassed around him indignantly. All this would never happen in a latin american university ; they’re too united and communicative, too organized. american students were trying to communicate about it using text messages and blogs ; we’ve so completely given up collective self-defense and communication for a kind of mediated pseudo-communication that maintains our isolation from each-other in the real world and so handed over our responsibility to mutually support and defend ourselves to police, that we’ve lost all ability to deal with the threat of violence.
And then the administration adds insult to injury by inviting the president, a thousand times worse a mass murderer, to come speak at the university. a disgrace ! The assassin was only taking lessons from the warmongers and the frenzied, bored soldiers that commit atrocities in the name of god nation and combat pay (a hundred times less than the military contractors they work beside). In much the same way, people look down on a bum for living off other people’s labor but wouldn’t think the same of a capitalist or religious leader who, himself completely unproductive, lives off the labor of other people, called his "employees" or his "flock."
In the same way, the gun control issue that immediately burst up around this event is a meager response, since people need to arm themselves with quick thinking, communications skills, and solidarity instead of guns — after all, how many frustrated individuals, incapable of communicating and working out their repressed passions, burst out violently through the easy cop out of grabbing a gun and killing as many people as possible ? The state takes this easy cop out in dealing with the world. Seung Cho took it too.